I know I’m not a great sales person. I don’t have the temperament or patience for it. But I do understand that if someone is going to partner with your company to provide services, you need to stand out. I also understand in a competitive market like the collection industry, you need to do things differently and be willing to change if you are going to grow and gain attention from creditors who are bombarded with sales pitches of the same-old same-old.
So if one of our sales people set up a Team meeting and invite me to attend, I absolutely love saying ‘Hey, you want to see something cool?’ and sharing my screen to show them something simple but very, very different from the other agencies out there.
This is an example (although I have several more) ... about 12 years ago, as we were improving our in-house CRM, I decided to add a feature – every time a staff member posted a collection payment in our system, it checks that client’s profile, and if this feature is turned on, it emails the collector handling the file notifying them of a payment, and cc’s the client.
Simple right?
This feature was developed because I know that clients don’t always know what we are doing internally, and while we are spending manpower and resources to collect their accounts, they don’t see the work under the hood. Sure we can send an inventory report to them, or a monthly statement, but a little positive reinforcement goes a long way. So if a client gets 2-3 emails today in real time saying ‘you just recovered money!’, that’s good news we want to share.
Furthermore, we put a human face to these messages – we share the name of the collector that collected the money, with their contact information. We’re not a faceless corporation, our team members’ names are paraded in front of our clients showing them who is doing the work that recovers their funds. And you know, the emails back form our clients saying ‘nice work!’ means a lot to our team.
Here's what one of these emails look like.
I’ve stood in a registration desk line at a conference, and one of my clients has turned around and said, ‘hey, I just got an email, thanks for the payment!’. That’s pretty cool, right?
It’s 8 lines of code. It cost us 30 minutes of time when we first coded it. It’s cost us literally nothing to implement it. It’s thinking outside the box. It’s only one of about fifteen ways we are radically different from our competitors.
What have you done to show your clients that you are different, that you care about their experience, and showing the work under the hood?
If you want to chat, or share cool things with each other, I’m always happy to chat – drop me an email.
Thanks kindly,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
blair@receivableaccounts.com
